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On the Origin of the Galactic Center S Stars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2010

Evgeny Griv*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel Email: griv@bgu.ac.il
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Most, if not all, galaxies with a significant bulge component harbor a central supermassive black hole. In our own Milky Way Galaxy, a disk of stars at a distance r ~ 0.05–1 pc orbits the radio source Sgr A* at the center. Stellar orbits show that the gravitational potential on a scale of ~ 0.5 pc is dominated by a concentrated mass of MBH ≈ 3.6 × 106M, which is associated with a supermassive black hole. In addition to the black hole, the models require the presence of an extended mass of (0.5–1.5) × 106M in the central parsec, which can be explained well by the mass of the stars that make up the cluster. Thus, the Galactic center star cluster is composed of a central supermassive black hole and a self-gravitating disk that is several Gyrs old and comprised of late-type CO absorption stars. Significant disk rotation in the sense of the general Galactic rotation has been detected. This system is probably a strongly warped, thin single disk; the mean eccentricity of the observed stellar orbits in the disk is e ≈ 0.36 ± 0.06.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2010

References

Griv, E. 2009, ApJ, 702, L1CrossRefGoogle Scholar